• Defining and clarifying personal/individual learning interests and transferring them into learning achievements
• Getting ready for learning
• Recognizing, identifying and documenting learning
• Collecting learning achievements

Duration

• 1 hour at the beginning of the training course
  
• 40 minutes at the end of the training course
  

The “Mandala of learners” is an individual work to better understand personal learning expectations. It needs to be set at the beginning of the training course and will be reused at the end of it.

To encourage deep reflection, create a calm atmosphere and put the material in the center of the room. Invite the participants to sit down where they feel comfortable to carry out the exercise.

Ask them to identify what they are interested in learning during the seminar/training course, what are their learning expectations: What do they want to gain? What do they want to take home? To help them, guide them with some questions, such as: - Why are they interested in the topic of this training activity? - What do they want to learn during this seminar/training course? - What do they want to happen to make this seminar/training course a success?

Make the participants aware that they are ‘the learners’, which means that they are at the centre of their “Mandala”. Invite them to draw and write in the paper their expectations and the goals they would like to achieve. Make them aware that at the end of the seminar/training course they will come back to this document to see if their expectations were met.

Each learning interest will be linked to one “shape” of a mandala. The size of each shape should be proportionate to the importance of that particular learning interest: the more important the learning interest, the bigger the shape should be. The participants should briefly name and describe their learning interests. They should only draw the outlines of the mandala and its shapes - without colouring in the spaces. Keywords associated with their learning interests can then be written into those spaces.

To help them to understand, give a quick example of how a ‘mandala of learners’ could look on the flipchart. They will have 40 minutes to draw theirs.

When the time is up, invite all the participants to lay down their creations on the floor and take a look at the other mandalas to acknowledge the group’s expectations. Collect all the mandalas and keep them in a safe place.

The day of the final evaluation, take out the Mandalas that the participants made on the first day. Invite them to take theirs and reflect on their achievements.

To measure how far the seminar/training course has met their expectations, they can color each shape. If some learning achievements have not been fully reached, they can just color half of the shape. If they come across learning achievements which were not mentioned in the learning interests, they can also add them to their mandala and color them in.

When the time is up, as at the beginning of the seminar, invite all the participants to lay down their creations on the floor and take a look at the other mandalas to acknowledge the group’s achievements.

After a few minutes, invite them to take their mandala back home as a reminder of the knowledge they acquired during the training course.

• 1 A4 sheet per person
• Color pencils + colors markers for all